rowena cherry’s Comments

Piracy is not "Fair Use". That is the issue. "Fair Use" is well defined, and while few would argue that it should be fair use for a blind person who has purchased a copy of a work to have it translated into whatever form they can enjoy, (or to be able to show proof of legal purchase, and then be supplied a translated copy), it is not fair use for one volunteer to acquire one copy of an e-book, and then to scan and translate it and to publish and distribute it to others.

"Bookshare" is a case in point. They call themselves a library, but they don't make arrangements with copyright owners. "Get books quickly and easily with new tools from Bookshare!" and "Share with students, let them download on their own, including NIMAC textbooks!*"

Copyright law gives two little-appreciated rights to copyright owners. The right to set a price for their work. The right to exercise or not exercise all or part of their copyright.

The Request For Relief by the DOJ appears to open the door to giving both those copyright rights to Amazon. What is more, the wording is so vague that the copyright arrogation is not limited to the rights formerly belonging to authors of the ebooks that are the subject the complaint.

Look at d.

VIII. REQUEST FOR RELIEF
104. To remedy these illegal acts, the United States requests that the Court:

a. Adjudge and decree that Defendants entered into an unlawful contract, combination, or conspiracy in unreasonable restraint of interstate trade and commerce in violation of Section 1 of the
Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. (squiggle that I don't have on my keyboard) 1;

b. Enjoin the Defendants, their officers, agents, servants, employees and attorneys and their successors and all other persons acting or claiming to act in active concert or participation with one of more of them, from continuing, maintaining, or renewing in any manner, directly or indirectly, the conduct alleged herein or from engaging in any other conduct, combination, conspiracy, agreement, understanding, plan, program, or other arrangement having the same effect as the alleged violation or that otherwise violates Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. (squiggle that I don't have on my keyboard) 1, through fixing the method and manner in with they sell e-books, or otherwise agreeing to set the price or release date for e-books, or collective negotiation of e-book agreements, or otherwise collectively restraining retail price competition for e-books;

c. Prohibit the collusive setting of price tiers that can de facto fix prices;

d. Declare null and void the Apple Agency Agreements and any agreement between a Publisher Defendant and an e-book retailer that restricts, limits, or impedes the e-book retailer's ability to set, alter, or reduce the retail price of any e-book or to offer price or other promotions to encourage consumers to purchase any e-book, or contains a retail price MFB;

e. Reform the agreements between Apple and Publisher Defendants to strike the retail price MFN clauses as void and unenforceable; and

f. Award to Plaintiff its costs of this action and such other and further relief as may be appropriate and as the Court may deem just and proper.

Copyright law gives two little-appreciated rights to copyright owners. The right to set a price for their work. The right to exercise or not exercise all or part of their copyright.

The Request For Relief by the DOJ appears to open the door to giving both those copyright rights to Amazon. What is more, the wording is so vague that the copyright arrogation is not limited to the rights formerly belonging to authors of the ebooks that are the subject the complaint.

Look at d.

VIII. REQUEST FOR RELIEF
104. To remedy these illegal acts, the United States requests that the Court:

a. Adjudge and decree that Defendants entered into an unlawful contract, combination, or conspiracy in unreasonable restraint of interstate trade and commerce in violation of Section 1 of the
Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. (squiggle that I don't have on my keyboard) 1;

b. Enjoin the Defendants, their officers, agents, servants, employees and attorneys and their successors and all other persons acting or claiming to act in active concert or participation with one of more of them, from continuing, maintaining, or renewing in any manner, directly or indirectly, the conduct alleged herein or from engaging in any other conduct, combination, conspiracy, agreement, understanding, plan, program, or other arrangement having the same effect as the alleged violation or that otherwise violates Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. (squiggle that I don't have on my keyboard) 1, through fixing the method and manner in with they sell e-books, or otherwise agreeing to set the price or release date for e-books, or collective negotiation of e-book agreements, or otherwise collectively restraining retail price competition for e-books;

c. Prohibit the collusive setting of price tiers that can de facto fix prices;

d. Declare null and void the Apple Agency Agreements and any agreement between a Publisher Defendant and an e-book retailer that restricts, limits, or impedes the e-book retailer's ability to set, alter, or reduce the retail price of any e-book or to offer price or other promotions to encourage consumers to purchase any e-book, or contains a retail price MFB;

e. Reform the agreements between Apple and Publisher Defendants to strike the retail price MFN clauses as void and unenforceable; and

f. Award to Plaintiff its costs of this action and such other and further relief as may be appropriate and as the Court may deem just and proper.

the Digital List Price information suggests that the price of $5.99 was set by the publisher (James Crawford), which means that he was on the 35% rate.

Mr. Crawford must have decided that 35% of $5.99 was preferable to 70% of whatever Amazon would have sold it for, taking into account the fact that Amazon allows lending of books on the 70% rate by every customer who buys a copy, also account sharing for up to at least 6 customers, and now lending by Amazon to Prime-paying customers in addition.

Also, Amazon is able to change its contracts with authors at any time without notification. 35% looks like a sensible deal to me!

"No. I'm saying that there are all sorts of business models and new services they can use to make more money. But those new services won't start under SOPA."

But why should we?

Let's take the flood of abuse as read, also all the comments about buggy whip manufacturers.

Look at Dexter Haygood on Simon Cowell's X-Factor as an example. Dexter was voted into the mentoring program because he is really, really good at singing like James Brown. That's his talent. It's what he does best and what he likes to do.

Why should he have to sing a sexually ambiguous pop song?

Maybe he could make more money if he offered new services, and adopted a business model involving bells, whistles, tassles, dancing girls and imitation military costumes, but you are expecting a good old dog to learn new tricks.

So far, for authors, I haven't seen any helpful suggestions from pirates on how authors could make more money while giving away their writing free.

The current law says that OSPs must respond to 1) DMCA notices and 2) red flags.

Most OSPs ignore anything other than DMCAs.

So, they are NOT providing a tool that meets all the requirements under the law. If a car manufacturer sold a car with a handbrake but no working footbrake, and as a consequence, drivers broke the law by driving through traffic lights or crashing into property, I think we'd blame the tool provider.

OSPs have no duty to monitor their sites, but they DO have a duty to remove infringing content once they are made aware that it is there.

That's not really working out so well. Scribd does a reasonable job, so it is possible.

4shared is a Cyberlocker. It claims a monthly rate of 55,000,000 (fiftyfive million) unique visitors and 2,500,000,000 (is that two-and-a-half billion?) page views. A MONTH.

Sites like this need to be encouraged to NOT host infringing content. Their business model is sloppy. It does not pay to follow a law that contains loopholes. It does not pay to enforce TOS, so they mostly don't.

They put up the verbiage, do untold harm to small business pesons (authors), and if the author happens to find out that their copyrights are infringed, and sends in a DMCA, then they remove the individual file.

But, it has already been "shared" through their services with others, and any file can be re-upped.

Nah, Mike. You are wrong about EBay. I've considered starting a class action lawsuit against EBay more than once, but the fact is, it is not "dedicated to copyright infringement" so it has never occurred to me, and will never occur to me to report EBay to ic3.gov .

EBay is merely an unwitting "fence", and only sometimes. Occasionally, it does a Lord-Nelson/Telescope-To-Blind-Eye imitation, but I challenge anyone to say that it is "dedicated" to copyright infringement.

I reckon that the technology exists. Have you ever filled out a survey, or written to your Congressman, and if you miss out a box, the app (or whatever runs the thing) refuses to submit it until you complete whatever you omitted?

Mike Masnick writes, "A bill like SOPA creates so much liability that it would be impossible for two engineers in a garage to build the next great startup unless they also had a dozen lawyers sitting with them."

Mike, are you saying that business startups are necessarily virtuous, even if their profitability depends upon ripping off authors and musicians and actors.... because it would be "too hard" for them to respect other creators' copyrights?

Are you therefore saying that authors, creators, musicians ought to embrace being ripped off, because other people need to rip them off in order to make a quick buck?

There are things that your fantasy guys in a garage could do.
1. Terms of Service that people read. Every vital paragraph ought to have to be checked, and there ought to be a timer, so robot checking didn't work.

"Who has time/who can be bothered to obey rules," you might say. Or perhaps you want to tell me that reading rules stifles innovation?

2. When a person wishes to upload a file large enough to possibly be an entire work (e-book, movie, magazine etc) a pop-up should appear, asking the uploader to verify that they WROTE this work personally.

The pop-up might also involve a legal disclaimer with the same info used on a counter-DMCA, which could be stored in advance, and which the uploader would have to agree would be shared with any DMCA claimant.

This would save a lot of time. It would educate a lot of innocent and deluded folk who mistakenly assume that they own the copyright of any e-book or i-movie they snagged from a pirate site.

It would also provide a clear chain of good faith proof by those garage guys, and if Joe Dirt were on record as having claimed to have personally written the entire works of Harlan Ellison, Clive Cussler, Nora Roberts, also of JK Rowling, also John Grisham, also of twenty-five Elloras Cave anthologies, and the entire collected works of Terry Pratchett, it might be fairly easy for those two garage guys to decide what to do in the event that someone were to point out that Joe Dirt couldn't possibly be telling the truth.